On Monday August 25, 2014, I quit my job.
It’s not something I broadcasted or touted on social media (okay, I did a bit on Twitter, but that’s kind of like yelling into a bottomless pit where thousands of other people are screaming, ‘Buy my book! Buy my book!’, so obviously no one really noticed except for a few pals), I just did it and did it without an ounce of regret.
The reasons I quit are numerous, but mostly it had to do with my 108 mile daily commute and the fact that I was basically in a dead end job with no real chance of advancement or a significant raise in pay. (But isn’t that every job to one extent or another?) So, yeah, I just quit. Mrs. Rawson, of course, knew what I was doing, but other than her, no one else was aware. By the way, folks, if you’ve never just quit a job you can’t stand—this was the first and probably last time I’ll ever do it—it’s one of the most satisfying feelings you’ll ever experience and I highly recommend it if you get the opportunity.
Originally the idea was for me to just get another job in my latest field (social media) and that was that. For about three weeks, I hit the virtual pavement, turning in around 60 resumes and starting each morning in front of my computer with various job search websites open, ready to receive my greasy little CV. I was doing okay in the job hunt. I’d had a phone interview and one face-to-face interview, (one of the guys I interviewed with was actually a fan of my short stories and LitReactor columns, so that was kind of cool) but overall looking for a job was fairly drudgerous and unproductive. I was enjoying that I suddenly had gangs of time to work on my writing, plus being a house husband and not having to get up at 4:30 to drive an hour to one of the worst neighborhoods in Phoenix was pretty nice.
But after three weeks, things were relatively fruitless and then Mrs. Rawson suggested something I never thought she would: She suggested I try becoming a full-time freelancer. I’ll admit it, I was a little floored by it, especially since both Mrs. Rawson and I both come from very working class backgrounds, and the idea of being unemployed—even purposefully unemployed—is kind of a sacrilege. But after getting over my initial shock, I said fuck it and charged full bore into freelance life.
If You Don’t Have A Plan, Get One
Thankfully I had a plan if the opportunity to go freelance ever became available to me. Yeah, I actually had a business plan, and to be blunt, if you don’t have one, get one. That’s right, actually sit down and write out how you would make a living as a writer.
I know all of us don’t like to think about the ‘business’ side of writing. All of us are beautiful and unique snowflakes and oh-so precious. But when you freelance full-time, you’re essentially becoming your own small business. So long before I ever thought about quitting my job, I actually had a business plan in place that I had discussed with Mrs. Rawson several times. (By the way, folks, probably the biggest key to my scenario is Mrs. Rawson. Mrs. R has always been extremely supportive of my writing and right now she is shouldering our financial life. This is slowly shifting, but I give Mrs. R HUGE props for letting me stretch my creative legs.) So she knew that the plan was fairly solid. Plus, I already had close to a decade of publication credits under my belt, so that made me fairly attractive to websites and other publications.
The first couple of months of freelancing, money was sporadic. Work came in drips and drabs, but I stayed busy with fiction and taking care of my house and family. Then suddenly in December, I found myself with around 65,000 words of contracted work, and let me tell you, that shit was a little scary. Up until that point, the most I had probably written in one month was around 25,000 words, but now here I was staring in the face of the word count equivalent of a short novel.
I know a ton of you participate in NaNoWriMo (who else thinks this is the most annoying acronym ever?) and a good chunk of you have churned out 50,000 + words in a month. But I’ve read my share of NaNoWriMo novels, and the bulk of them have been a disjointed mess. The one good thing about NaNoWriMo novels is that after you’ve finished them, you have the benefit of taking them and whipping them into readable shape. I didn’t have that benefit, what I had to produce had to be publication ready articles, book and movie reviews, columns, and one book. It seemed like an impossible task. It wasn’t though, I was up for it.
Say Goodbye To Free Time
This, in general, has been my biggest obstacle with freelance life: I don’t know when to shut down. One of the biggest benefits of working a day job is that when the day is done, it’s done. Once you leave the office and get in your car, jump on a train or bus or however else you get home, you can simply zone out the day. You can go home, eat dinner, watch television, jerk off to internet porn, whatever. But with freelancing, my office is right downstairs when I wake up in the morning, and with my gig, there’s always something to do and I always feel like I should be doing it. This was particularly true in December with such a large work load on my hands.
And trust me, I wanted to screw around. Here’s the other downside of my home office. My office houses around 2000 books and my collection of action figures. My office is an infantile middle-aged male’s wet dream come true, and after nearly four years of being away from my little fantasy den 12 hours a day, five days a week, I wanted nothing more than to be able to kick back and crack into my seemingly bottomless to-be-read pile.
And don’t even get me started about the near constant siren song of the internet. Netflix, Hulu, HBOGo, Facebook, Twitter … Goddamn, all of it is so fucking inviting!
But I had to bury all that desire to binge read and watch and fuck around on social media, and I just wrote and wrote and wrote some more for an average of 11 hours a day. My biggest one day total was 10,000 words, the smallest was 3000, and I hit—more or less—all of my deadlines a day or two in advance. (Thank the Jebus my editor here at LitReactor, Josh Chaplinsky, is kind of used to me cutting deadlines close.)
So What Does 65,000 Words In One Month Literally Feel Like?
Physically, well, it hurts. I always used to think carpal tunnel syndrome was absolute bullshit. But not anymore! At the end of every day, the first two knuckles of my right hand look like walnuts and feel like I have shards of glass floating around in them. My right elbow and wrist are also just kind of numb most (all) of the time. And, unfortunately, I’m a sloucher when I’m working, so my lower back and tailbone usually feel like they’re fused together. And mentally, well, at the end of each day I feel like the guy in Scanners whose head explodes. Plus my overall level of anxiety was kind of off the charts. But, seriously, I’m not complaining about any of this. I’m getting to do what I’ve worked a lifetime to accomplish, and despite all the little aches and pains and the lack of free time, I know how lucky I am.
What’s Next?
So I don’t know if I’ll ever take on that much paid work again. I’m sure it will happen, but I’m hoping there’s at least a month in-between so I can focus a good hunk of my day on my material. And so far this month, that’s what I’ve been doing. Over the last four years, I’ve managed to stockpile a pretty massive amount of unpublished short fiction in various notebooks and hard drives (I’ve also published about 20 or so pieces in that time, too). So I’ve decided to gather it all up and start self-releasing three volumes of short stories as well as the two novellas I churned out over the past couple of years. And there’s a poetry collection, too, and a novel that’s a pubic hair away from being done. And I’m starting my own website where I’ll be blogging on a daily basis, and, of course, I’ll still be writing for LitReactor and the various other websites and publications I’ve been hired to write for.
I know this all sounds really ambitious, but, honestly, I’m giving myself two years to see if I can pull my own weight financially. I’m pretty confident it will happen, but if it doesn’t, oh well, I’ll rejoin the rat race without a complaint, and keep writing in my spare time just like I always have. But you can bet your ass that I’m going to take full advantage of this time.
One last challenge I set for myself during the month of December was that I wanted to try and write a pulpy 60,000 word crime novel in three weeks just to see if I could do it.
I’m four days and 8000 words in. Does anyone else want to join me?
About the author
Keith Rawson is a little-known pulp writer whose short fiction, poetry, essays, reviews, and interviews have been widely published both online and in print. He is the author of the short story collection The Chaos We Know (SnubNose Press)and Co-Editor of the anthology Crime Factory: The First Shift. He lives in Southern Arizona with his wife and daughter.
